The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Entities such as business enterprises often obtain video, voice and data networking services from network service providers. A service provider typically enters into a contractual agreement with a customer that elects to use the service provider's network for sending and receiving packets. An example of such a contract is a Service Level Agreement. The contract outlines the terms the service provider must meet while transmitting the customer's packet traffic over the service provider's network. The service provider typically meets the terms of the contract by classifying packet traffic flowing through its network into various classes and designates a path for each class.
Packet traffic classification is typically dependent upon quantitative or statistical attributes of paths such as throughput, delay, jitter and/or loss. Additionally, relative attributes such as a packet's priority of access to network resources may also be used. Once a packet has been classified, the service provider routes that packet through its network via the path designated for the packet's class.
Present approaches for classifying packet traffic are typically coarse and face scalability issues as the size of the network grows. They do not provide the capability to achieve a finer level of packet traffic classification that is desired to accommodate modern application requirements and customer expectations nor the flexibility required to manage a network with such level of packet traffic classification.